At Collaborate, and on the Web, come on and join us and F2F with
the tech-saavy! COLLABORATE Social Media Hour Tues, 4/24,
1–2 pm Exhibit Hall-IOUG Booth There’s no 140 character limit for
this meet up! Stop by the IOUG … Continue reading →

Clay Shirky
tells a great story. Here Comes Everybody begins
with a case of a lost phone in a taxi cab, and the extraordinary
turn of events that led to the owner retrieving it. From photos
posted online, to NYPD who were uninterested in following up, to
taking it all online. Through that online publicity, the story
got picked up by the NY Times and CNN, which put pressure on the
police to track down the taxi. It's a great example that
illustrates the nuances, both good and bad, powerful and
persistent that the Internet can unleash.

Throughout the book he weaves stories about the network effect,
friends and friends of friends, and how that impacts information,
organization, and the spread …

There wasn't a great deal of hacking, at least in the traditional
sense, at the "first congressional hackathon." Given the general
shiver that the word still evokes in many a Washingtonian in
2011, that might be for the best. The attendees gathered together
in the halls of the United States House of Representatives didn't
create a more interactive visualization of how laws are made or a
mobile health app. As open government advocate
Carl Malamud observed, the "hack" felt like something even rarer
in the "Age of the App for That:"

Impressed @MattLira pulled off a truly bipartisan tech event
on the hill. …

Stumbling onto 800-CEO-Read, and their top books feature, I found
Brogan and Smith's work. Brogan's blog
intrigued me enough so I walked down to the Strand here in NYC to
pick up a copy.

What I found was an excellent introduction to the nebulous world
of social media marketing, where you find all sorts of advice and
suggestions on how to engage your target audience. If
you're feeling like an ignoramus on matters of social media,
Trust Agents is a great place to start and will give you ideas of
how to 'humanize' your digital connections.

The authors illustrate the Trust Agent idea with Comcast Cares
for example and how they engaged customers, and …

Congratulations to Khailee for getting GroupsMore sold
to Groupon (in a record five months since its inception!). He
tells me they’re now Groupon Malaysia and Joel (his partner,
co-founder of YouthSays) is going to be CEO of Groupon Malaysia.
A lot of people instantly said that since Groupon is now in
Malaysia, all the other deal sites can go the way of the dodo.

I don’t think so. For a site that does group purchases to be
successful, people need to know it exists. Savvy Malaysians have
always been into group purchases because a) our currency
generally sucks, b) its difficult to get cool stuff shipped to
Malaysia. Of course the currency is improving now, and there are
virtual postboxes that ship stuff to Malaysia for a small fee.

But I digress. Group purchasing has been happening for years,
heck over a decade. I remember …

Learned a few things during my trip to the Philippines this time.
Another country that amazes me. For the first time in history,
Philippines attracted more foreign direct investments (FDI) than
Malaysia, in 2010 (see: Malaysia’s FDI plunge).

Mobiles

There are a lot of people here using prepaid phones as opposed to
postpaid phones. This is because the requirements of getting a
postpaid account is quite tough (you need bank documents, etc.
before they give you an account).

Many people carry more than one phone (or have more than one
SIM). Smartphones face an uphill battle – they cost too much and
there is generally no operator subsidy because everyone prefers
prepaid accounts. It makes economic sense to have more than one
SIM, as you’ll end up saving money (operators like to offer free
text, calls, …

I work for a start-up and like the folks at virtually every
start-up we dream of being covered by one of the Big 8
business publications: The Wall Street Journal, The
New York Times, Forbes, Fortune,
BusinessWeek, The Economist, the Financial
Times, and USA Today.

The folks at ITDatabase took a closer look at how they cover
the tech industry and surveyed a group of veterans from major
tech PR agencies to see what their experiences were like. The
…

When Twitter decided to slowly roll out a new, official retweeting feature, people
waited in anticipation. When they let their users know what it
might look like, people debated whether that was the right way
to deploy it. When it actually became available, people almost
universally disliked it.

But my post is about why I love the new Twitter retweet feature, without
ever having to think about it. The reason is that official
retweeting represents the new-new arms race for authority among
power users. The new-new arms race, you say? Yes, because the new
arms …

As I’ve blogged many times, MySQLers frequently share
off-work interests and running is one of them. I’ve also blogged
about social media, which usually use MySQL under
the hood. Now I’ve combined the two (running and social media)
with the insight that running is a religion: I’m
propagating Runnism, the Religion of Running.

Laurel Ruma (@laurelatoreilly) just did a quick census of the
number of O'Reilly employees on twitter. She came up with 74
twitter accounts out of about 300 employees worldwide, plus five
people who were controlling departmental or project-based
O'Reilly twitter accounts like the following:

Official O'Reilly account:@oreillymedia: The top level O'Reilly Media
site.

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